More Dutch pals in the form of smartarse Industrial Electronic quartet Doxa Sinistra.Who treat us to an off kilter excursion down the Paul Hardcastle n-n-n-n-n-n-n-Nineteen route,by sampling off the telly,specifically news broadcasts,and some Clint Eastwood samples,adequately Hardcastled on a couple of tracks. It sounds as if they mostly still adhered to the old Skool Industrial technique of using magnetic tape rather than shelling out for an Ensoniq Mirage,as featured by the bloody fucking awful Big Audio Dynamite group around this time, featuring the Posh Rasta himself, Don Letts. I even bought one when it was cheap in 1989,cost me £500 quid from the big music shop in the centre of Town;...you know,one of those places that leave you standing there like a plonker while the shop assistant plays a Rick Wakeman number on the latest Yamaha digital piano . "Alright mate, wot can I do you for?" it quipped;.....they are all 'funny' of course,....and pretentiously laid back as if on weed like the failed pop stars the staff of these horrendous places, without exception, were.
"He wants to buy a Mirage!" he shouts across the shop floor."Ha Ha Ha! responds the rather unoccupied staff.
"You're lucky, there's one left, and its on sale", says Dick Wakeman...."Sure you don't want an Emulator 2?"..."er no?"I mumbled,reluctantly revealing my wad of fifties clutched tightly in my fist.
One of the best things about the Internet is that all these places and their equivalents, have now become figments of their own non-existent imaginations,and are now ,thankfully, bankrupt.
The Mirage worked just fine for a while, until the Floppy Disc Drive died. The keyboard was actually rather good,so i used it as a master controller,more than a crap sampler.
One did actually go back to that very same musical emporium to purchase an Akai sampler in the 90's,but this time i was served by a rather attractive young lady,the failed poop-stars were now noticeably absent,who proceeded to sell me anything she could think of,and largely succeeded.The flirting ended as soon as the transactions were registered.....her choice/loss.
One must say, there doesn't seem to be that much News sampling going on in these Doxa Sinistra tracks,I thought I'd mention them by name to remind you of the subject of this waffle,but there is quite a bit of that Dutch ability to talk like an automated voice program going on.The electronic,mostly analogue,backing tracks would have benefited greatly from no speaking Dutchmen or news samples polluting the nicely minimal EBM Industrial tunage of this,lets face it,it's a concept album innit?...but that's always been the downfall of many a concept album is it not? The reliance on filler tracks to convey a story-line that no-one gives a flying duck about.
The Who's "Tommy" being a prime example....or is that atrocity better described as a 'Rock Opera',like Jesus Christ Superstar, or a lurid example of why Concept albums are generally as terrible as they seemed to obviously be on paper? Tommy would have benefited greatly by the violent death of the title character by the end of track one,then cut it down to be the marvelous EP it certainly should have been.....as for Quadrophenia.....don't get me started!
Tracklist:
Channel One
A1 Station Call
A2 Newsflashes
A3 Media Bomb
A4 Remote Birth Control
A5 Foreign Correspondent
A6 Swindle
A7 The Sky Is The Limit
Channel Two
B1 Televisor
B2 Call Now!
B3 Cocoon World
B4 International Cycling Sport
B5 Il Spirito Di Sergio Leone
B6 The 12 Miss Pelicoes
